


Whispers in the Night

by janjanfollower



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-10
Updated: 2015-11-10
Packaged: 2018-05-01 00:13:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5184941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/janjanfollower/pseuds/janjanfollower
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Percy has a bad dream, and this isn't the first time he's had these dreams. || Basically the nightmare from the beginning of episode 27</p>
            </blockquote>





	Whispers in the Night

For a moment, he is weightless. His body fails to exist, simply a consciousness, and it feels common. For that split second, reality fails to exist as his mind slips between the cracks, a veil blacker than gunpowder cloaking his bodyless form. It exists only for that split second, however, as the void explodes into a dark castle after a bright blinding light, sudden masonry lit by candlelight as screams echo against the stone. He's running suddenly, landed within the running form, as his head jerks backwards and in an all-too familiar way tries to grasp what he's seeing before he sees his brother with a crossbow bolt suddenly appeared in his throat, hearing his far-off gags as he runs. He's gone from the hallway, far too far away for the time of travel to allow, when he is standing in front of a window at the perfect moment to see his sole older brother fall in a streak of navy and violet and gold from the fall, his open mouth silent. The smell of iron and burnt flesh is new to his nose, even though he has killed many a man before, and his face is wet with tears as his throat burns against his chokes and a suddenly-suffocating fire that does not exist in this memory. Days pass in seconds as he appears within the body of a man who has horror suddenly hit him, hearing a female voice scream, a voice that not a fortnight ago had cooed him to sleep, and he can clearly see just how the dungeon cell is deteriorated in this frozen, crystalline snapshot. Cassandra's voice comes before her face, holding Percival's shoulders as she whispers harshly with a strength she never had that if she falls he still flee. And he can still remember how her hand slipped from his, what was so tight and strong suddenly limp like a corpse, and how he chose to listen to her first set of orders and not her screaming to help her, panicked and pained and dying.

Before he can look back behind him, to see her blonde and crumpled form against the snowy underbrush of the forest that he couldn't forget no matter how much liquor he let himself drink, his vision is replaced as his mind flies into another form of himself. It's not a him of his memory however, not a body of Percival de Rolo during the siege; he can see himself from a third-party perspective, watching his form back away with unsteady and scared feet, no older than thirteen years of age but still adorned with elegant robes of linen and silk in the flashy colors the de Rolo's presented themselves in. He sees his child self cave into his body, falling to a crouch as his arms go to his ears and head bowed into his knees, and his mind's eye can't help but watch this rising smoke from the flaming barrier surrounding this child's shape congeal with no wind, bringing the blood red of the twilight sky into the shape of a barrel of a chest while thick but also spindly arms swoop to surround the child on his sides. The face of this smoke doesn't look at the young Percy, however, and instead where the twinkling stars of the sky had once been were now the smoke's eyes, too-bright and filling his stomach with the feeling of stones. His voice echoed in the space of hell, not unlike the illithid he and his team had once allied themselves with; where the arcanist was an addition of thought in his mind, however, this voice was enveloping, covering all over sensation with his thunder of a voice. _You hold your vengeance, Percival. You made it. You only need to take it for yourself. Make. The world. Rrright. My gift is yours, and your gift shall bring justice._ Percy sees out of the edge of his eye, his child's form shrink even further within itself, shaking and weak, and if he had a body right now he himself would be far from doing anything else. The smoke has its eyes locked onto him, however, onto the mind's eye that exists not, and whatever power he could use to look away has been sapped by the sulfur burning in the air. 

_Our bargain stands eager to close._

His body is kicked out of his mind, the smell of sulfur immediately sending him back into a panic before the heat of the forge reminds his mind that he is within Greyskull Keep. His glasses are crooked and barely bent on his face (far from the first time), and his unwieldy leather forging gloves are still on his hands as his shaking shoulders gingerly and slowly push his body off his desk. The idea of time returns to Percy, but his body knows that it doesn't exist, how he had spent more than 36 hours alone in his dark workshop with only the soft orange glow of embers as his sunlight. He takes long, slow, shaking breaths, to remember that what is a dream is just a dream, but before long his hands need fly up to remove his glasses and rub his face, clearing away the immediate horror of what he just bore witness to, again. 

Whatever a dream may be, his dreams still haunt him, and a sick boulder in his stomach says that this won't be the last time he has this dream.


End file.
